Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing
by Cynthia C. Wesley-Esquimaux, Ph.D. and Magdalena Smolewski, Ph.D.
by Cynthia C. Wesley-Esquimaux, Ph.D. and Magdalena Smolewski, Ph.D.
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Chapter 3<br />
as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race” (History Television,<br />
n.d.:1-2). Several officers followed his suggestion, which resulted in smallpox epidemics among several<br />
<strong>Aboriginal</strong> communities.<br />
Very few were left to pass traditional knowledge as leaders, philosophers <strong>and</strong> healers to others in the<br />
community. Surviving community members, deprived of experienced leadership <strong>and</strong> vast amounts of<br />
traditional knowledge, became more reliant on European trade goods <strong>and</strong> more vulnerable to the<br />
missionaries’ pressure to convert to Christianity. The <strong>Aboriginal</strong> way of life that enabled Indigenous<br />
people to be masters of their socio-cultural universe for thous<strong>and</strong>s of years was broken apart by disease,<br />
violence, hunger, despair <strong>and</strong> an increasing reliance on the fur trade. When the fur trade finally collapsed<br />
in the 1920s, <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people in North America suffered exorbitant asperity. Epidemics of tuberculosis<br />
<strong>and</strong> influenza continued to decimate the population of <strong>Aboriginal</strong> communities. By the 1930s, officials<br />
in the Canadian government assumed that the <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people were a dying race.<br />
Defined as such, generation after generation, <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people began shutting out their sensory<br />
perceptions, their needs <strong>and</strong> feelings <strong>and</strong> their hopes <strong>and</strong> dreams as individuals <strong>and</strong> as a social group.<br />
<strong>Aboriginal</strong> people also ignored the fact they were shutting out everything to the point that this shuttingout<br />
process began to fail to function. Instead, their raw memories of experienced trauma began to flood<br />
into awareness; for many, it was without an underst<strong>and</strong>ing of where those memories were coming from.<br />
Many <strong>Aboriginal</strong> people began acting out what could not be fully represented (or fully remembered) in<br />
their own minds <strong>and</strong> a new kind of disintegration followed: alcoholism, drug addiction, violence,<br />
sexual abuse <strong>and</strong> suicide. This acting out was like confronting ugly, faceless ghosts in a dark room: a<br />
losing battle with the frightening shadows of the past.<br />
Avoidance of awareness of experienced personal trauma or trauma collectively experienced in the near<br />
<strong>and</strong> distant past is the way people protect themselves from painful <strong>and</strong> fearful experiences in the present.<br />
In the introduction to her book, <strong>Trauma</strong> <strong>and</strong> Recovery, Herman says: “The ordinary response to atrocities<br />
is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter<br />
aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as<br />
powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work” (1997:1).<br />
The goal of any healing process is a recovery of awareness, a reawakening to the senses, a re-owning of<br />
one’s life experience <strong>and</strong> a recovery of people’s enhanced abilities to trust this experience. In a successful<br />
healing process, this will be coupled with the recovery of a social ability to create a new cultural paradigm,<br />
to bring order out of what has been chaos. The aim of a healing process is to recover a full person<br />
(culture) <strong>and</strong> to develop anew lost capacities for feeling <strong>and</strong> expression. The goal is to recover <strong>and</strong><br />
reintegrate the past into the present. Many different healing modalities have been proposed to deal<br />
with the effects of trauma (<strong>and</strong>/or with the post-traumatic stress disorder) <strong>and</strong> it is believed that the<br />
conventional treatment for PTSD does have a place in the initial phase of healing the effects of historic<br />
trauma. The treatment usually has three principal components: 1) processing <strong>and</strong> coming to terms<br />
with the horrifying <strong>and</strong> overwhelming experience; 2) controlling <strong>and</strong> mastering physiological <strong>and</strong><br />
biological stress reactions; <strong>and</strong> 3) re-establishing secure social connections <strong>and</strong> inter-personal efficacy.<br />
The aim of these therapies is to help traumatized people move from being dominated <strong>and</strong> haunted by<br />
the past to being present in the here <strong>and</strong> now, capable of responding to current exigencies with their<br />
fullest potential. Thus, the trauma needs to be placed in the larger perspective of a person’s (or group’s)<br />
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